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T H E OS C H OL A R S
May I Say Nothing?
July 2008
reposted October 2016
Program of Work
Oscar Wilde and Victorian Edutainment: Lecture Tours as 19th-Century Itinerant Entertainment
Jason Boyd
‘The scene was one of those Lyceum-halls, of which almost every village has now its own,
dedicated to that sober and pallid, or, rather, drab-colored, mode of winter-evening entertainment,
the Lecture. Of late years, this has come strangely into vogue, when the natural tendency of things
would seem to be, to substitute lettered for oral methods of addressing the public. But, in halls like
this, besides the winter course of lectures, there is a rich and varied series of other exhibitions.
Hither comes the ventriloquist, with all his mysterious tongues; the thaumaturgist, too, with his
miraculous transformations of plates, doves, and rings, his pancakes smoking in your hat, and his
cellar of choice liquors, represented in one small bottle. Here, also, the itinerant professor instructs
separate classes of ladies and gentlemen in physiology, and demonstrates his lessons by the aid of
real skeletons, and mannikins in wax, from Paris. Here is to be heard the choir of Ethiopian
melodists, and to be seen, the diorama of Moscow or Bunker Hill, or the moving panorama of the
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Chinese wall. Here is displayed the museum of wax figures, illustrating the wide Catholicism of
earthly renown by mixing up heroes and statesmen, the Pope and the Mormon Prophet, kings,
queens, murderers, and beautiful ladies…. And here, in this many-purposed hall,... here the
company of strolling players sets up its little stage, and claims patronage for the legitimate drama.’
(Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance 196)
This quotation testifies to the significance of lecturing as a cultural practice in the nineteenth century. Th
popularity of the Lyceum lecture system that disseminated useful knowledge to the general public is indicated in
he observation of the national proliferation of the lyceum hall, but the quotation also vividly illustrates th
radual ‘transformation of the lyceum [both the system and the space] from mutual-education society to a forum
or… entertainment’ (Ray 14), itself part of a broader confluence of, and blurring of, itinerant education and
pectacle – what is today termed ‘edutainment.’ The aim of ‘Victorian Edutainment’ is to examine this cultura
phenomenon, using as a focus Oscar Wilde’s lecture tour as an Aesthete preaching the gospel of ‘The English
Renaissance,’ ‘The Decorative Arts,’ and ‘The House Beautiful’ in the United States and Canada (1882) – a tou
otaling 139 engagements, which took him from New York to California, from Texas to Ontario, Quebec and th
Atlantic provinces – and his subsequent career as a professional lecturer in the British Isles (1883-5). Althoug
actual accounts have been published (see Lewis and Smith; O’Brien), the North American lecture tour ha
eceived little scholarly analysis; Wilde’s career as a lecturer in the British Isles has received practically none,
esult of a chronic scholarly disinterest in Wilde’s career and writings before the ‘major phase’ of the 1890s. Mor
roadly, scholarship on itinerant lecturing tends to focus on the periods before the educational lecture circui
ecame ‘commercialized’ and ‘adulterated’ with entertainment; theatre history scholarship, in contrast, has largel
gnored lecturing as a form of entertainment. But, in order to understand itinerant lecturing as a cultura
phenomenon in the later nineteenth century, it must be examined as an integral part of itinerant entertainmen
ircuits, as a particular (educational) species of the entertainment genus.
The collection of evidence from newspapers, archives and theatre history collections, local studies publications
istories of individual venues, published lectures, biographies of itinerant entertainers and lecturers, etc., of th
ntertainments that were being offered in towns and cities during the performance seasons in which Wild
ectured will recreate the entertainment milieu in which Wilde was a player and will enable a reappraisal of
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argely trivialized and misunderstood phase of his career. In Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, Professo
Westervelt, a self-accredited psychologist, lectures, to the contemporary reader incongruously, ‘in Oriental robes
ooking like one of the enchanters of the Arabian Nights’ (199). Similarly, Wilde scholarship has been unable t
econcile the sincerity with which Wilde regarded himself as an aesthetic apostle with his concern that the tour b
personally lucrative, his wardrobe reflecting aesthetic dress reform that yet suggested the costumes of th
esthetes parodied in Gilbert & Sullivan’s operetta Patience, and his admiring reception by audiences and b
otable Americans and Canadians with the scurrilous attacks on his charlatanism made in the press. B
econstructing the entertainment culture of physiology professors, thaumaturgists, Ethiopian melodists and wa
popes in which Wilde performed and competed for audience attention and money, this project will enable me t
produce a book-length study exploring the ways in which these seeming contradictions are a reflection of th
ulture of nineteenth-century ‘edutainment.’ Additionally, in a manner analogous to Knoper’s work on Mar
Twain, for example, it will further my study of Wilde’s construction of his artistic persona in public, through th
media, and through his writings. It will build upon the work of my master’s thesis, ‘’Aesthete of Aesthetes’: Punc
nd the Self-Marketing of Oscar Wilde,’ which explored the artistic and media culture of 1870s and early 1880
London in which Wilde deliberately marketed himself as an aesthetic personality, a strategy which led to th
proposal of the North American lecture tour by Richard D’Oyly Carte, the impresario who produced Gilbert &
ullivan’s operettas. My Ph.D. dissertation, ‘‘Fiction in the Form of Fact’: The Tragedy of Oscar Wilde’ furthered
my interrogation of Wilde biography’s focus on his ‘tragedy’ (his arrest, trials and imprisonment) as th
nterpretative key to Wilde’s entire life and career, thus devaluing significant aspects of it (especially his pre-1890
areer), and consequently misunderstanding it as a whole. Scott’s point about the appeal and payoff of nineteenth
entury lecturing is particularly germane to Wilde’s career: ‘It helped one acquire a number of the social and wha
might be thought of as ‘performance’ skills required to navigate successfully an increasingly fluid, mobile, and
nonymous society. It was also an apprenticeship in the kind of salesmanship…that was so much a part of
market-oriented society’ (1986: 67). Lecturing, I maintain, had a crucial impact on Wilde’s later career because th
kills Scott enumerates were central to Wilde’s strategies of self-marketing as they were brought to bear on hi
public roles as an (in)famous author, playwright and media personality.
Victorian Edutainment’ additionally aims to serve a broader purpose beyond its contribution to Wild
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cholarship. It will participate in the ongoing development of On The Road Again: Tracking Itinerant Performanc
Through Time, a collaborative web-based project launched in April 2007 and provided as a publicly-accessibl
nline resource through the University of Toronto Libraries (UTL). On The Road Again is a hub linking togethe
heatre history projects that use the original database programming created in collaboration with UTL’
nformation Technology Services, originally for the Records of Early English Drama Project’s Patrons an
Performances Web Site and adapted for The Juba Project: Early Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain, 1842-1852. ‘Victoria
Edutainment’ will contribute to ‘universalizing’ the programming in order to make it useful and user-friendly fo
ther theatre history projects and scholars. On the Road Again is an ideal electronic forum for the hard data that wi
nform the argument of my book, allowing me to collect, analyze and disseminate evidence on the edutainmen
ontext of Wilde’s itinerant lecturing, thereby making accessible a diverse range of transnational (United States
Canada, England, Ireland) data that will be of interest and use not only to other theatre history scholars, bu
cholars interested the history of education, popular culture, itinerancy and the origins of global networks o
ultural exchange. Ultimately, this is the aim of On the Road Again: a repository of theatre history projects the dat
f which can be globally accessible to a wide range of research queries and thus engender new projects. Therefore
Victorian Edutainment’ will ultimately contribute not only to Wilde scholarship but to scholarship on a range o
istorical inquiries as well as to the growing corpus of globally-accessible Canadian humanities computin
esources.
 Jason Boyd is Associate Professor and
Co-Director, Centre for Digital Humanities, Ryerson University.
Bibliography and Citations
Bailey, Peter. Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
Cherches, Peter. ‘Star Course: Popular Lectures and the Marketing of Celebrity in Nineteenth-Century America
Ph.D. diss., New York U, 1997.
Conolly, L.W., ed. Theatrical Touring and Founding in North America. Westport: Greenwood P, 1982.
Edwards, Murray D. Stages in Our Past: English Language Theatre in Eastern Canada from 1790s to 1914. Toronto: U o
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Toronto P, 1968.
oulkes, Richard, ed. Scenes from Provincial Stages. London: Society for Theatre Research, 1994.
Gentile, John S. Cast of One: One Person Shows from the Chautauqua Platform to the Broadway Stage. Urbana: U o
llinois P, 1989.
Guy, Josephine M., and Ian Small. Oscar Wilde's Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteent
Century. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance. 1852. New York: Penguin, 1986.
The Juba Project: Early Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain, 1842-1852. U of Toronto Libraries. 15 Sept. 2007
ttp://link.library.utoronto.ca/minstrels/
Knoper, Randall K. Acting Naturally: Mark Twain in the Culture of Performance. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.
Lewis, Lloyd and Henry J. Smith. Oscar Wilde Discovers America. 1936. New York: B. Blom, 1967.
Lewis, Robert M. From Traveling Show to Vaudeville: Theatrical Spectacle in America, 1830-1910. Baltimore: John
Hopkins UP, 2003.
McNamara, Brooks, ed. American Popular Entertainments. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1983.
Morse, F. W. ‘American Lectures.’ The Writings of Oscar Wilde, Volume XV: His Life with a Critical Estimate of Hi
Writings. London & New York: Keller-Farmer Co., 1907: 73-134.
----. ‘Lectures in Great Britain.’ The Writings of Oscar Wilde, Volume XV: His Life with a Critical Estimate of Hi
Writings. London & New York: Keller-Farmer Co., 1907: 159-72.
O’Brien, Kevin. Oscar Wilde in Canada: An Apostle for the Arts. Toronto: Personal Library, 1982.
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Oscar Wilde and his Literary Circle Collection of Papers, 1819-1995.’ William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
5 Sept. 2007. http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/clarklib/coll.htm
Patrons and Performances Web Site. Records of Early English Drama (REED) Project. U of Toronto Libraries. 15 Sept
007. http://link.library.utoronto.ca/reed/
Pruett, Barbara J. Popular Entertainment Research: How To Do It and How To Use It. Metuchen NJ: Scarecrow P, 1992.
Ray, Angela G. The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States. East Lansing: Michigan Stat
UP, 2005.
Reed, Thomas B., ed. Modern Eloquence, vols. 4-6 [Lectures]. Philadelphia: J.D. Morris, [1900].
addlemyer, Ann, ed. Early Stages: Theatre in Ontario, 1800-1914. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1990.
cott, Donald M. ‘Itinerant Lecturers and Lecturing in New England, 1800-1850.’ Itinerancy in New England and New
York. Ed. Peter Benes. Np: Boston U, 1986: 65-75.
----. ‘The Profession that Vanished: Public Lecturing in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America.’ Professions an
Professional Ideologies in America. Ed. Gerald A. Geison. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1983: 12-28.
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